KARACHI: The buses arrived at the polling stations set up in connection with the by-election on a National Assembly seat, NA-237, in district Malir on Sunday. The women voters in bright Balochi dresses coming out of the buses also had their children and several joyriders accompanying them. They were more like picnickers than voters. The male voters were also in great spirits.

The posters showing the correct way to cast your vote had no meaning for them because majority of them couldn’t read or understand what the pictures or diagrams indicated.

Walking past the posters that had the various election symbols such as the spanner, camera, crane, book, wicket, bat and even the arrow, their eyes fixated on the bigger arrows pasted here and there on the walls of the polling stations to direct them to their respective polling booths. “Teer! Teer! [Arrow! Arrow!]” They pointed out the symbol that mattered to them as they rushed through the school corridors.

Maybe they looked like a lot of voters but the actual voters among them were few. The joyriders were more in number. One mother who handed over her baby with big wide open brown eyes and curly hair to one of her older kids to mind while she went inside to vote, came back to relief the older kid and pinched the baby’s cheek lovingly only to leave the black ink from her finger on the baby’s face.

There didn’t seem to be any reason to ask the Balochs who they were voting for so one turned one’s attention to the people who were not conversing in Balochi or Sindhi.

“I’ll vote for whoever my heart directs me to vote,” said a fair-skinned female voter with bright red lips and covered head. Upon being pushed to indulge in telling anyway, she smiled and uttered: “The crane. TLP [Tehreek Labbaik Pakistan] of course.”

Then another female voter covered in a big chador walked in to be greeted and hugged by the fair-skinned voter. Someone asked if she was also a TLP voter, and the reply was “Inshaallah.”

The polling staff at the Malir polling stations was also very chatty and friendly. Voting there carried on in a far relaxed manner in the latter part of the day though there were some clashes among party workers earlier such as the clash between the Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf activists at the Gul-i-Rana Sindhi School in Asu Goth and the attack on PTI’s city president Bilal Ghaffar allegedly by PPP’s Saleem Baloch and his men in Ghazi Goth.

The overall turnout was not very impressive but it was way better than the turnout in NA-239 (Korangi).

In the areas like Malir Cantonment and adjacent societies, PTI supporters reached to polling stations to cast their ballot in favour of party candidate Imran Khan. However, such scenes were missing in the rural parts of the constituency.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2022